So you gotta acknowledge that in some fashion, diplomacy, calling ’em the axis of evil, might have been a factor here. Now, I know the Democrats don’t call it diplomacy. I don’t care what the Democrats call it. They may call it bullying, cowboy diplomacy, whatever. It was diplomacy. It was words. The State Department hated it. So what? State Department hates everything that works, otherwise there’s no need for them. Don’t tell me about the State Department. I couldn’t care less. Get this. I want to read this to you again here from Norman Podhoretz. He quotes a little sentence here from the NIE report: ‘With opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways.’ In other words, we must use negotiations and sanctions, with the opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, its prestige, and its goals for regional influence. This is tantamount to saying, ‘Okay, nut job Ahmadinejad and the mullahs, we want you guys to have self-esteem.’ This is an intelligence estimate? Sounds like an encounter group. ‘Okay, Mahmoud, we want you to have your self-esteem, you and the mullahs. We want you to feel good about yourselves. We want you to have prestige. We understand that you people as Persians have a very, very concerned status about how you are perceived in your part of the world and we know that you want to appear to be on top of that world, and we’re all for making that happen, Mahmoud. We want you to have your prestige, we want you to have your power and we just don’t want you to do it with nukes. We’ll help you come up with… that kind of passage is that from an intelligence estimate?
Now, where are the candidates on this? Mrs. Clinton is really, really reaching here to bash President Bush and take off on this report, from the New York Times today: ‘The campaigns of the leading Democratic candidates seized Monday on an intelligence report showing that Iran had halted its development of nuclear weapons, saying the findings justified their more cautious approach to Tehran. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s national security director, Lee Feinstein, said the report’s findings ‘expose the latest effort by the Bush administration to distort intelligence to pursue its ideological ends.” Now, just what have we done in Iran? We haven’t done diddly-squat. Distort the intelligence for what purpose? Have we attacked Iran while I wasn’t looking? ‘He added that the report ‘vindicates’ Mrs. Clinton’s approach, which he described as ‘vigorous American-led diplomacy, close international cooperation and effective economic pressure, with the prospect of carefully calibrated incentives if Iran addresses our concerns.” What a bunch of mumbo jumbo gobbledygook. Has the New York Times forgotten that she voted in the Senate to call the Iranians the Revolutionary Guards and cite them?
‘In September Mrs. Clinton, Democrat of New York, voted in favor of a Senate measure declaring the Iranian Revolutionary Guards ‘proliferators of mass destruction,’ a vote that was condemned by her rivals in the Democratic field. After the vote, her aides issued a statement saying, ‘The Revolutionary Guards are deeply involved in Iran’s nuclear program.” I mean, this is like Mrs. Clinton on the floor of the Senate back in whatever it was, 2003. (paraphrasing) ‘Well, I have independently looked at this, and I’ve seen the intelligence, and I know that Saddam’s got weapons of mass destruction, and my husband knew it, too, all the way back in 1998.’ So what a reach. Now, she’s saying the fact that she voted in the Senate to declare the Iranian Revolutionary Guards proliferators of mass destruction, she’s now saying her diplomacy brought about this NIE report which says the Iranians stopped producing a weapons program in 2003? ‘Mrs. Clinton’s rivals used the release of the report on Iran on Monday to condemn the Bush administration, as well as to once again attack Mrs. Clinton’s vote on declaring the guards a terrorist organization. That vote, they suggested, was evidence of her hawkishness on Iran.’ These people get away with having both sides of the issue, whatever it is.
All right, to the phones. People want to weigh in on this. We’ll start in Maple Grove, Minnesota. This is Chris, and thank you for calling. Welcome to the program.
CALLER: Good morning, Rush.
RUSH: Hi.
CALLER: You know, the interesting thing that comes to mind is, I thought about this yesterday, let’s take the report at face value. What you had pointed out is, if they stopped in 2003, same time Libya said, as you said, no mass, so there was diplomacy, and the diplomacy was that our military was a great part of it, of what they saw happening in their area. Now let’s look at back to when Ahmadinejad’s saber-rattling started all over again, and that was right about the same time when our Democrats started their diplomacy saying, ‘We give up, we failed, we lost, we surrender,’ which emboldened him to start the saber-rattling again. So, yeah, they’ve been doing diplomacy, too. Unfortunately, their diplomacy has created this again, I believe.
RUSH: Absolutely. That’s a good point. Plus, Ahmadinejad was openly campaigning for Democrats to win the election in 2006.
CALLER: Because he liked their kind of diplomacy.
RUSH: Right. Exactly right. It’s totally understandable to me that the libs and the Drive-Bys would want to take this report and spin it into an abject failure, and it’s totally understandable to me that Hillary Clinton and the Democrat presidential candidates would want to do the same thing. What is amazing to me is that it’s senseless. I understand their desire to do it but you cannot make the case here, unless you live in a time capsule of three years ago, four years ago where the template is Bush lied, Bush has never told the truth. Things have changed since then. Progress is being made in the war on terror, in Afghanistan and in Iraq. And, folks, I’m gonna tell you again, I think in their eagerness here to attack Bush and look at this — not as a foreign policy and national security issue — but rather a political issue and how they can use it to damage Bush, they’re opening the door right into their faces and bloodying their noses all over again, and they don’t even know that it’s happening yet. They will in due course.
Mike, Oceanside, California, you’re next. It’s great to have you here. Hello.
CALLER: Dittos, Rush. Thanks for taking my call. Yeah, you’re making the points that should be made here, and the three points are that, first of all, they probably ceased doing what they were doing based on the Gulf War. Secondly, it’s an intelligence estimate. It isn’t factual, no more factual than it was in the past. And third, we’re guessing as to what they’re actually doing because we don’t have the assets to tell what they’re doing. And you’re making all these points, where Bush is sitting up there almost apologetic rather than taking credit. I mean, if this was the Clintons, I guarantee you they’d be standing up with their feathers all waving saying, ‘We did this, we accomplished this,’ et cetera. I just don’t get it.
RUSH: Well, can’t help you.
CALLER: I didn’t think you would be able to.
RUSH: I don’t know. I can’t explain it. I don’t work there. All I can do is tell you here on my own radio program and my own press conference here what I think of it.
CALLER: Yeah, I didn’t mean to put you in that position where you have to —
RUSH: No, I love the position. I don’t mind saying I don’t know. Doesn’t happen very much.
CALLER: Well, yes. Anyway, try to find somebody who can tell those people how to crow about what they’ve accomplished. I mean, the Bush administration never takes credit for the things it tries to accomplish. Meanwhile, the Clintons, in stark contrast, and they continue to get away with it —
RUSH: I can give you one answer. It’s not by any means going to satisfy you. But this is something I know, and that is the president personally just doesn’t want to get involved in this kind of thing, in touting. To him, it’s beneath the office. He really believes — don’t doubt me on this, folks — he really believes that history, long out, history that’s going to be written by people not yet born, is going to get all of this right. He’s not concerned about public relations, as we all know. He’s not concerned with those kinds of things. He’s confident that he’s doing the right things and that history is going to get it right, and that’s enough to satisfy him. I know it doesn’t satisfy you, and you might think that I really don’t know what I’m talking about, but don’t doubt me.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I sit here and I marvel at the way the Drive-Bys and the liberals try to manage opinion and thought in this country. For example: global warming. I am one of many now starting to ask, ‘Well, what if you people in science are all wrong about this? What about the horrible economic consequences of implementing your policies, to deal with it when you are wrong?’
‘Oh, no, no. We’re not wrong. We can’t afford to be wrong! Why, we can’t afford to take the chance. We gotta go with this.’
Now, this NIE report — which, when you read it, is like a CYA. They basically say, ‘Well, they’re still enriching uranium, but it’s unlikely they’re trying to constitute their weapons program.’
So they’re covering their rear ends: CYA. There’s nothing really definitive in this, but you’ve got a couple interesting lines in it.
‘Wait a minute. What if the report is wrong?’
‘No, no, no. This is exactly right, and we’ve gotta get out of Iraq.’
The way we’re told to think about global warming, and the way we’re being told to think about this are two totally different things, and we don’t know if either are true. In fact, I will guarantee you we have more evidence that manmade global warming is a hoax than we do on what Iran’s doing with its nukes. Don’t doubt me. I have a question for these Democrat candidates, if I ever had a chance to ask them a question — and anybody in the State Department, too, and these people at the National Intelligence Estimate. Question one: Why is Iranian prestige more important than American prestige? Number two: How would you, as president, help advance Iranian prestige, Mrs. Clinton? ‘Well, vigorous diplomacy,’ or whatever gobbledygook answer that she would give. Richard in Memphis, you’re next on the EIB Network. Hello, sir.
CALLER: Hey, mega dittos, Rush.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: My first time ever getting through. It’s an honor and privilege to talk to you.
RUSH: Well, I appreciate it. Thank you very much, sir.
CALLER: Yes, sir. I completely agree with you, if the intelligence is correct — which, that’s a big IF — then I think that starts from fact that they are afraid after seeing how quickly we took out Iraq. However, I do think more on to that, I think that may be a reason why some of this information leaked out now, that we’re really starting to take a turn on the war on terror and I was wondering if you agree with that.
RUSH: Well, see, I mentioned this earlier. There’s something… There are so few coincidences. Now, this report came out a while ago, and it was only made public and the president only knew about it last week or something. We just found out about it, but it’s been in existence for, what, a month, something like that, three weeks? The point is this. We are. We have turned the corner big time in Iraq, and guess what’s on the table in the Senate? Funding for the troops to continue the surge, and guess who’s stopping it? Dingy Harry. Dingy Harry, in fact, is saying the surge isn’t working. He said we don’t have a chance of winning. He said it again yesterday. He said, ‘We’re in the middle of an intractable civil war.’ I guess the meeting with the anti-war crowd this week didn’t go too well for Dingy Harry. I’m sure he had the riot act read to him by MoveOn.org and the rest of these lunatics over these caves by Murtha and other Democrats on the surge working. So you’ve got the funding for the continuance of the surge. The Democrats in the Senate are trying to hold it up and establish circumstances where an immediate troop withdrawal has to begin if Bush is going to get the money, if the troops are going to get the money.
In the midst of all that, here comes this report saying, ‘Ah, there’s no threat over there in Iran. They stopped their nuclear program in ’03,’ which allows the Democrats to say, ‘See? Bush has been warmongering. He’s been talking mushroom clouds. There’s no danger! We could get out of Iraq.’ Look, when you start talking this high level of intrigue and behind-the-scenes stuff, none of this stuff is coincidence. I’m not saying this is a conspiracy that actually happened. I’m saying you can’t reject the possibility when thinking about this, if you accept that there are elements in our government, shadow government, comprised of just a bunch of career libs and Clinton holdovers who would do anything they could to sabotage the Bush administration. If you accept that, well, then you have to be open to any number of possibilities, and that is one of them. Get this. An AP story from Vienna: ‘A US intelligence review that concludes that Iran stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003 is consistent with the UN atomic watchdog agency’s own findings and should help to diffuse the current crisis the organ…’ What is this? So we’re supposed to say, ‘Okay, the UN’s watchdog group agrees with this intelligence estimate? Well, that’s real credible! Didn’t this ElBaradei guy, Mohamed ElBaradei (named after a teddy bear, by the way) start talking recently about the threat of the Iranian nuclear program, and hasn’t he been warning about it and the fact that the Iranians won’t let any inspectors in there?
What is this BS?